Natures Organics, a manufacturer of eco-friendly cleaning products based in Victoria, Australia, is benefiting from a timely tech reboot from Nutanix to improve services with data-driven decisions.
Enterprise cloud OS leader Nutanix and its partner Australian Sentinel have announced they are helping Natures Organics lower its technology and carbon footprints, reduce IT costs and future-proof its infrastructure as Australia’s manufacturing industry reignites.
Since 1981, Natures Organics has played a vital role in Australian homes as the nation’s pioneer in environmentally responsible initiatives, manufacturing eco-friendly cleaning products with a range of popular brands including Earth Choice, Australian Pure and OC Naturals. It creates over 50 million units of high-quality, affordable and naturally derived products sold through major retailers including Woolworths and Coles each year.
In keeping with its ethos, the company sought to overhaul its ageing IT environment to improve its overall technology efficiency, a move which would complement its A$3 million, 1299kW roof-mounted solar deployment on its Victorian manufacturing plant. Its prior IT environment consisted of an array of fragmented and overly complex three-tier infrastructure that was inefficient, expensive and cumbersome to manage, which negatively impacted speed and productivity in important areas such as business intelligence and management of critical applications.
“We receive thousands of customer enquiries per year and it’s vital we log and record those emails so the information can be transformed into actionable data,” said Alex Plattfuss, Head of IT, Natures Organics. “Our old environment slipped and stumbled to manage this, causing internal delays and headaches to get the data we needed. It was becoming prohibitively expensive and out of sync with our ethos and environmental commitment.”
Natures Organics engaged the services of trusted IT partner Australian Sentinel, which identified Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as the ideal solution to meet the company’s needs. The initial deployment leverages Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor, Prism Central centralized management platform and Files software-defined storage for data management and analytics.
The company projects IT-related energy consumption to fall 55%, reduced costs of 32%, as well as an 700% improvement in business intelligence reporting capacity and performance, eliminating the complexity that was hindering Plattfuss and the Natures Organics team. The deployment has also had a huge positive impact on critical application management performance and security, eliminating 70% of risks identified by Australian Sentinel in its analysis of the company’s IT infrastructure.
“Just by switching Nutanix on, the vast majority of these risks were mitigated or eliminated, with a clear pathway and simple platform to address the remainder,” said Tim Crouch, Director, Australian Sentinel. “This frees Natures Organics to securely launch new products, services and digital programs as it continues to expand in an exciting time for the manufacturing industry.”
Timely tech reboot as Australia’s manufacturing industry resurges
The upgrade comes at a crucial time for Natures Organics, with the manufacturing industry poised to play a pivotal role in Australia’s post-pandemic recovery. The company sees the upgrade as essential to enable it to drive new eco-friendly products, such as Cove – a new line of refillable cleaning products that aims to reduce single-use plastic by up to 80%.
“Nutanix has given us a digital reboot to help us capitalize on Australia’s resurgent manufacturing industry, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what the platform can do,” said Plattfuss. “We’re seeing more Australians wanting to buy local and buy green and we now have an IT environment in place that can match our growth and support us as we develop new refillable and other eco-friendly products in a secure, economical and efficient way.”
A recent report highlighted in-store refill as one of the major packaging trends dominating the retail industry in 2020.
“One of the key areas highlighted in the Government’s A$1.5 billion manufacturing strategy is for manufacturers to leverage digital tools to optimize operations and processes,” said Lee Thompson, A/NZ Managing Director, Nutanix.
“Natures Organics is an exemplar of this, leveraging technology to drive its business, reinforce its values and deliver quality homemade products to Australia and the world. Technologies like HCI and hybrid cloud are essential to enable manufacturers to eliminate unnecessary costs, accelerate their scale up and make the most of this resurgence to create new advanced manufacturing capabilities.”
